Liberal Institutions?

A passage from Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Revised Edition pinpoints the internal tensions of liberal order. Nietzsche writes, “If there are to be institutions there must be a kind of will, instinct, imperative, anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations forward and backward ad infinitum .” Institutions cannot reinvent themselves every generation, cannot rest on sheer consent. Insofar as these “liberal” values dominate, institutions become impossible.

In Nietzsche’s view, “the whole West no longer possesses those instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which a future grows: nothing goes so much against the grain of its ‘modern spirit.’ Men live for the day, men live very fast – men live very irresponsibly: precisely this is called ‘freedom.’ The thing that makes an institution is despised, hated, rejected: men fear they are in danger of a new slavery the moment the word ‘authority’ is even mentioned.”